The ascent in love for beauty, as Plato describes it, [Footnote: _Symposium._] might be expected to mark at every step an increase of poetic power, as it leads one from the individual beauties of sense to absolute, supersensual beauty. But it is extremely doubtful if this increase in poetic power is achieved when our poets try to take the last step, and rely for their inspiration upon a lover's passion for disembodied, purely ideal beauty. The lyric power of such love has, indeed, been celebrated by a recent poet. George Edward Woodberry, in his sonnet sequence, _Ideal Passion_, thus exalts his mistress, the abstract idea of beauty, above the loves of other poets: Dante and Petrarch all unenvied go From star to star, upward, all heavens above, The grave forgot, forgot the human woe. Though glorified, their love was human love, One unto one; a greater love I know. But very few of our poets have felt their genius burning at its brightest when they have eschewed the sensuous embodiment of their love. Plato might point out that he intended his theory of progression in love as a description of the development of the philosopher, not of the poet, who, as a base imitator of sense, has not a pure enough soul to soar very high away from it. But our writers have been able partially to vindicate poets by pointing out that Dante was able to travel the whole way toward absolute beauty, and to sublimate his perceptions to supersensual fineness without losing their poetic tone. Nineteenth and twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their most idealistic verse. However this may be, one notes a tendency in much purely idealistic and philosophical love poetry to present us with a mere skeleton of abstraction. Part of this effect may be the reader's fault, of course. Plato assures us that the harmonies of mathematics are more ravishing than the harmonies of music to the pure spirit, but many of us must take his word for it; in the same way it may be that when we fail to appreciate certain celebrations of ideal love it is because of our "muddy vesture of decay" which hinders our hearing its harmonies. Within the last one hundred and fifty years three notable attempts, of widely varying success, have been made to write a purely philosophical love poem.[Footnote: Keats' _Endymion_ is not discussed here, though it seems to have much in common with the philosophy of the _Symposium_. See Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, pp. 160ff.]